Many hands may not make light work

In 1957, British naval historian and management satirist C. Northcote Parkinson painted a cynical picture of a typical committee: It starts with four or five members, quickly grows to nine or ten, and, once it balloons to 20 and beyond, meetings become an utter waste of time.

These troubles arise because larger teams often place overwhelming “cognitive load” on individual members. As a group grows, each member devotes more time to coordination chores (and less time to actually doing the work), more hand-offs between the growing cast of members are required (creating opportunities for miscommunication and mistakes), and because each member must divide his or her attention among a longer list of colleagues, the team’s social glue weakens (and destructive conflict soars).

One nurse said: “Now there is much more of a sense of ownership of each other. I’ll say, ‘My pod isn’t running well. Where is my doctor?’ And he’ll be accountable to me. And the doctors will say, ‘Where are my nurses, who do I have today?’” People rarely, if ever, claimed each other in this way before the pods were implemented even if they were working together on many shared cases. A resident would have used more detached language like, “Who is this patient’s nurse?” – ignoring the relationship they themselves had with the nurse – rather than, “Where are my nurses?”

The pods also created big efficiency gains. Valentine and Edmondson analyzed data on 160,000 patients served by the department during the six months before the pods were created and the year after. After the pods, patient throughput time plummeted by about 40%, from about eight hours (8.34) to five hours (5.29) per patient, without increased staffing levels. This drop reflects not only a more efficient use of staff. Think of the patient's experience; five hours at the hospital sucks a lot less than eight.

The upshot is that many hands do not always make for light work, especially when it comes to team size. But some organizations encourage bloated teams with misguided incentives, rewarding managers more for growing their teams. When team members report that they are locked in dysfunctional conflict, suffering from indifference, making bad decisions, or missing deadlines, the first question we ask is “how big is the team?” If the answer is more than five or six members, especially more than than ten, some savvy subtraction or division can create striking improvements. As Valentine and Edmondson's research shows: Leaders become more effective. Efficiency improves. Interpersonal friction wanes. And strangers become friends.